global witness
performance, about 45 minutes long.
The organization Global Witness campaigns to end environmental and human rights abuses driven by the exploitation of natural resources and corruption in the global political and economic system. Their annual report on attacks on land and environmental defenders from 2018 revealed that 164 environmental activists were killed in 2018. Many of them were assassinated by corporations or governments. The highest number of reported deaths occurred in Guatemala and the Philippines. These people were simply defending their land, water, and air in their homes.
The book, Who Killed Berta Cáceres? Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet, by Nina Lakhani is a deeper look into this issue.
Reading about these activists whom I considered to be martyrs made me mourn their collective loss from the world. Seeing all of their names together…there were just so many. I personally felt a deep connection, like I needed to memorialize them. I also felt some guilt. I had been considering the idea of ethical justice, the practice of protest, and the idea that so many indigenous people are killed and martyred in the pursuit of capitalist economies and colonialist conquest. I can’t explain why, but I felt as though, as an environmental activist myself, I was not giving enough; I was not giving everything I possibly could to the cause.
In this piece, global witness, I wrote every one of the 164 names by hand on the gallery walls, using biodegradable oil sticks. In the piece, I drag a ladder around with me, climb it, and crouch down, filling the walls as far as the confines of my physical body would allow, without stopping until I was done. Once I finished writing the names, I buried my reference list in a handmade body - bag filled with soil.
“Because on the ground where Ate Glo’s (Capitan) body fell, where the blood from her body flows, more anti-coal activists will sprout. Instead of silencing us, it will only strengthen our convictions that the evil menace of coal must end. And we will persevere in this fight and see to it that our children and the children of our children will be free from it.” - Val de Guzman, speaking on the death of an activist from the Phillipines: Gloria Capitán.
